Greater New Orleans

THE ENERGY OF A TRUE BELIEVER CAN BE CONTAGIOUS

STAFF PHOTO BY SCOTT THRELKELDAttorney Colette Pichon Battle, who works for housing rights, is in her second year of living in a FEMA trailer in the Bayou Liberty area near Slidell. She's been devoting 'every second and every dime' to community rebuilding efforts, but -- particularly now that she's engaged to filmmaker Trupanier Bonner -- she knows it's time to find another place to live. Read her story in This Mold House, page 50.

By Renee Peck InsideOut editor

How tired do we get before we just can't find the energy to put one foot in front of the other any more?

On my bad days (Monday night, watching the Saints, was one of them), I look to my friend Colette Pichon Battle for inspiration.

She's a YURP -- one of the Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals that my colleague Molly Reid has been writing about. In fact, she may well be the ultimate YURP. If there's any energy lacking in her step, I've yet to see it. And yet she has every reason to stumble in a journey buoyed by spirit but weighted by geography, race and economics.

Like me, Pichon Battle graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio. When I'm being honest, I admit I chose the school for its then seven-to-one male-to-female ratio. (I went to an all-girls high school.)

Pichon Battle had an equally lifestyle-oriented choice for choosing Kenyon: "I picked the college the greatest distance from home that offered me a full scholarship."

She grew up, you see, in a Creole community in Slidell. It was a close-knit group, the proverbial village, where she was known as Coco because, as a newborn, her skin was a lovely hue her French-speaking grandmother called "chocolat." Despite the Creole enclave, she also grew up aware of the racial tension and inequities in the Deep South. Thus her determination to see how brown people were treated elsewhere.

Not much differently, it turns out. Kenyon proved a warm and welcoming community, the rural North less so. She got a great education, while friends back home held neighborhood fish fries to raise money for college airfare and books and other incidentals. After graduation, she attended Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where she began practicing law. She developed an expertise in immigration law and a passion for women's rights.

Then Katrina came. Like so many other young professionals, Pichon Battle felt compelled to come home. To do something concrete and constructive and on-site. In December '05 she quit her job and returned to Slidell, and a month later moved into a FEMA trailer parked in the front yard of her late grandmother's flood-ravaged shotgun. Her aunt lives in a second trailer, an uncle in the house itself, which he is slowly rebuilding. Her mother, who lived in the house before Katrina, remains in Dallas.

In her public persona, Pichon Battle is a whirlwind. Upon her return, she created Moving Forward Gulf Coast, a non-profit agency that has raised money for the homeless, gathered volunteer law students to counsel the poor, collected food and household necessities for storm victims and lobbied for policy change.

Pichon Battle has donated countless pro bono hours to immigrants and the poor; she sits on committees and leads forums devoted to community planning and rebuilding. She's been interviewed widely and speaks for our cause across the country. This week she's heading to California to give a talk at Stanford University Law School. Recently, she took a job with Oxfam America, an international human rights organization dedicated to housing and eradicating poverty. Her fiance, filmmaker Trupanier Bonner, has taken over the day-to-day running of Moving Forward Gulf Coast.

In her private life, however, Pichon Battle is, like so many of us, getting tired.

The bureaucracy of everyday life exhausts her. The lack of affordable housing depresses her. She and Bonner are getting married in November and are looking for an apartment. They'd love to buy a house, but want a place where they can someday raise a family. So far, everything they've looked at is beyond their means. They liked a cute townhouse near the water in Slidell, but it's renting for $2,000 a month. Now they have an eye on a simple one-story brick without a view that will cost them $900.

Meanwhile, they're on their second year in the FEMA trailer. What's it like? I asked.

"I wake up at 6 a.m. with a headache and backache from the bad bed and the fumes and wobble into the bathroom, where for whatever reason we don't have hot water," Pichon Battle said with a rueful laugh. "I'm at work by 7 and stay there all day.

"Almost every night, sometime between REM sleep and dawn, an alarm goes off in the trailer. I don't know why. You have to press the button and open all the windows and doors and put on the fans, and then the alarm stops. I don't know what it's for. It's one of four alarms in the trailer. The other two are for smoke and carbon dioxide. We assume it might be formaldehyde fumes setting it off, and we've asked for testing. But so far we haven't been able to get anyone to come out."

She returned to her trailer one day recently to find that a FEMA official had visited and pulled the residential permit off the inside window. No notice, no reason given. Now she worries that she'll arrive home from work some evening to find the trailer gone.

"We've stayed in the trailer because, until I got my new job five weeks ago, I was totally dedicated to keeping the organization running," Pichon Battle said. "I put every second and every dime, including my personal savings, into that. We're professionals who want to stay here and have a family. But there is just so little (housing) that's affordable."

I'm worried. If a professional couple -- a lawyer and filmmaker -- are having trouble making a go of it here, then what are the teachers and waiters and taxi drivers going to do? And New Orleans needs people more than ever.

Pichon Battle, with her can-do attitude and moral certainty, shrugs off such worries. She's determined to make a difference, and certain she'll find the right place to live. She has dreams, too, of a family and a life on the north shore. Someday, she'd like to start a community center devoted to preserving traditions of the local Creole culture.

So she rises in the dark to turn off an alarm registering a danger she can't fathom. She works relentlessly to find homes and jobs for people who have less than she does. She puts one foot in front of the other, tirelessly.

The day that her step, or that of others like her, falters, New Orleans is lost. But the fact that she continues her journey, with energy and creativity and enthusiasm, keeps me going as well. Especially on the bad days.